Watch this science video tutorial from Nurd Rage on how to make silver nitrate from silver and nitric acid. They show the chemistry of making this cool chemistry, colorless solid.
WARNING: This reaction produces toxic nitrogen dioxide gas. Do not perform this reaction indoors, only do it in a fume hood or outside.
Simply place some pure silver in concentrated nitric acid and heat it up. The reaction proceeds too slowly in cold nitric acid to be useful.
Wrap your silver in aluminum wire to better control the reaction. If it proceeds out of control and fizzes too much or generates too much gas too fast then you can pull the silver out of the acid to stop the reaction.
Only aluminum is resistant to nitric acid, other metals are destroyed and will contaminate your acid.
We're going to use the silver nitrate to perform silver chloride photography, making mirrors, and even making flash powder.
Brought to you by one of WonderHowTo's favorite scientists NurdRage.
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3 Comments
Im wondering why my acid turns blue when I do exactly the same thing you are doing.
Im trying to silver plate some copper but it wont work. Is my energy source too high of an amp im using an old phone charger as my electrical source, it's a 5.0v - .7mla
Or is my silver nitrate contaminated? The copper wire just turns real black and none of the silver sticks.
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